07. Social Justice and Intercultural Education
Ignite Talk (20 slides in 5 minutes)
The Many Ways Teachers and Researchers Use the Term ‘Cultural Capital’
Sally Riordan
University College London, United Kingdom
Presenting Author: Riordan, Sally
The topic of this research is the dissemination of cultural capital theory and research from academic communities to school staff. It explores what it means to be a research-informed teacher, most especially with respect to educational inequalities regarding class and cultural background. This is both an empirical study (drawing from interviews with members of school staff), as well as a theoretical one (considering issues in the philosophy of language and the philosophy of science). It explores the following:
(1) what teachers (especially school leaders) mean by ‘cultural capital’ (in particular, how this is revealed in their justifications of school practices);
(2) how the current meaning and use of ‘cultural capital’ in schools relates to Bourdieu and Passeron’s theory of social reproduction; and
(3) how the current meaning and use of ‘cultural capital’ in schools relates to the research evidence regarding cultural capital that has accumulated in the last 50 years.
The study has European significance because it raises questions regarding the transfer of theoretical concepts from one national context to another. Academics’ use of the term capital culturel is charted through studies across Northern Europe (Breinholt & Jaeger, 2020; Bourdieu and Passeron, 1990; Jaeger & Breen, 2016; Lareau & Weininger, 2003; Sieben & Lechner, 2019). Some political conditions that are exacerbating the challenges of research dissemination in this case are highlighted, but the challenges are not specific to the UK.
In order to compare the viewpoints of practitioners with those of academics, I draw on theoretical frameworks of cultural capital associated with the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron (1990), including the interpretations of John Goldthorpe (2007) and Lareau and Weininger (2003). I also turn to the work of Saul Kripke (1981) and Mark Wilson (2008) to reflect on how the meaning of terms is transmitted between people and to examine the appropriateness of our everyday conceptual frameworks regarding evidence and research dissemination in the field of education.
I will share some of the uses and meaning of ‘cultural capital’ in schools in England and reflect on how these compare with Bourdieu and Passeron’s use of the term capital culturel (1990). The purpose will be to make some suggestions regarding the challenges to using research evidence in practice: the different meaning of terms, the lack of detail in research messaging, the vagueness of research summaries, the requirement (in England) to demonstrate that money spent to reduce educational inequalities is supported by evidence (DfE, 2019). The study raises concerns about the feasibility of usefully transmitting research messages to teachers. I do not propose that teachers are at fault in their use of ‘cultural capital’, but that we need to accommodate the natural ways in which language transfers ideas in our conceptualisations of evidence and research dissemination. I present the findings and hypotheses that resulted from the study in order to ignite further discussion with the audience.
Methodology, Methods, Research Instruments or Sources UsedThis paper reports on the findings of a study into educational inequalities funded by the Social Mobility Commission. 150+ interviews were conducted with school leaders, classroom teachers and support staff at 32 secondary schools in England between October 2019 and March 2020. The objective of the wider project was to explore what schools are doing to support children from lower income homes. The topic of cultural capital was raised by participants in 38 (25%) interviews at 14 schools (47%) when describing what their school was doing to reduce educational inequalities. These 38 interview scripts form the basis of this study.
Thematic analysis was used to investigate what teachers and support workers meant by ‘cultural capital’ when they introduced this term of their own accord during interviews to describe school practices. The analysis was first completed using themes that arose in the interviews (broadening horizons, community, confidence, cultural diversity, curriculum, deficit model, enrichment, literacy, non-academic purposes, and relationship building). The analysis was also conducted using codes drawn up from a literature review and an analysis of the work of Bourdieu and Passeron (arbitrariness, economic resources, highbrow, parental cultural capital, inculcation, and tastes/preferences). This enabled a more systematic comparison between practitioners’ and academics’ use of the term ‘cultural capital’.
I further analysed the interview scripts to identify and categorise all cultural capital practices described by practitioners as taking place in their schools during the 2019-20 school year. A ‘cultural capital practice’ was defined generally as any intervention or approach taken by the school in order to give students access to cultural capital. (‘Giving access’ was the most commonly used description of cultural capital transmission by practitioners, who also used the phrases ‘giving’, ‘improving’, ‘skilling up’, ‘gaining’, ‘filling in’ and ‘compensating for’). A total of 30 cultural capital practices were contrasted and compared regarding their approach, objectives and reasoning to draw out their underlying assumptions. An ‘interventionist account of cultural capital’ was then drawn up to summarise the assumptions and understandings of school staff regarding cultural capital.
Conclusions, Expected Outcomes or FindingsThe study found that teachers in English schools use the term ‘cultural capital’ in multiple (and contradictory) ways. The term has retained many hallmarks of Bourdieu and Passeron’s theory of social reproduction, but has rejected others, and has assimilated ideas regarding cultural diversity and inclusion, most especially Tara Yosso’s concept of ‘community cultural wealth’ (Tichavakunda 2019; Yosso, 2005). Cultural capital practices make different assumptions about the causes of educational inequalities and how to tackle them. Some seek to make changes in children’s homes. Others attempt to mimic the homelife of more affluent children in school time. Some try to compensate for a perceived lack of cultural capital. Others attempt to change the school curriculum to weaken the correlation between cultural capital and academic achievement.
The study also found that 'cultural capital’ is acknowledged by practitioners to be a technical term that generally ‘carries’ with it the weight of research evidence. Practitioners understood that there is evidence that supports cultural capital practices in general, and therefore that any cultural capital practices are backed by evidence. This confidence in research evidence came from colleagues, school leadership, and the fact that the organisation for school standards in England had recently introduced cultural capital into its inspection framework (Ofsted, 2019). However, the practices implemented did not closely reflect the large international body of cultural capital literature. I conclude that disseminating research has not worked in this case. However, considering the details of this case, I suggest that the challenge lies in the nature of ordinary language, and not in the skills of teachers or researchers. It is not that we should change how others use the term ‘cultural capital’, but that we need to pay attention to how they do so. I propose this has significant consequences for how we think about research dissemination.
ReferencesBourdieu, P., & Passeron, J.-C. (1979 [1964]). The Inheritors: French students and their relation to culture. Trans. by Richard Nice. University of Chicago Press.
Bourdieu, P., & Passeron, J.-Claude. (1990 [1977]). Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture. Sage.
Breinholt, A & Jaeger, M.M. (2020). How does cultural capital affect educational performance: Signals or skills? British Journal of Sociology, 71(1), https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-4446.12711
DfE. (2021). Pupil premium: Conditions of grant 2021 to 2022 for free schools and academies. Guidance. Published 30 March 2021. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/pupil-premium-allocations-and-conditions-of-grant-2021-to-2022/pupil-premium-conditions-of-grant-2021-to-2022-for-academies-and-free-schools
Feyerabend, P. (1993). Against Method (3rd ed.). Verso.
Goldthorpe, J. H. (2007). “Cultural Capital”: Some Critical Observations. Sociologia. 2/2007 https://doi.org/10.2383/24755
Jaeger, M. M., & Breen, R. (2016). A Dynamic Model of Cultural Reproduction. American Journal of Sociology, 121(4), 1079–1115. https://doi.org/10.2307/26545706
Kripke, S. A. (1981). Naming and necessity. Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
Kuhn, T. S. (2012). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (4th ed.). University of Chicago Press.
Lamont, M., & Lareau, A. (1988). Cultural Capital: Allusions, Gaps and Glissandos in Recent Theoretical Developments. Sociological Theory, 6(2)
Lareau, A., & Weininger, E. B. (2003). Cultural Capital in Educational Research: A Critical Assessment. Theory and Society, 32(5/6). Special Issue on The Sociology of Symbolic Power: A Special Issue in Memory of Pierre Bourdieu), 567–606.
Ofsted. (2019). Education inspection framework (EIF), last updated 11 July 2022. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/education-inspection-framework
Prieur, A., & Savage, M. (2013). Emerging Forms of Cultural Capital. European Societies, 15(2), 246–267. https://doi.org/10.1080/14616696.2012.748930
Davies, S., & Rizk, J. (2018). The Three Generations of Cultural Capital Research: A Narrative Review. Review of Educational Research, 88(3), 331–365. https://doi.org/10.3102/0034654317748423
Sieben, S., & Lechner, C.M. (2019). Measuring cultural capital through the number of books in the household. Measurement Instruments for the Social Sciences, 1(1). https://doi.org/10.1186/s42409-018-0006-0
Tan, C. Y. (2017). Conceptual diversity, moderators, and theoretical issues in quantitative studies of cultural capital theory. Educational Review, 69(5), 600–619. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131911.2017.1288085
Tichavakunda, A. A. (2019). An Overdue Theoretical Discourse: Pierre Bourdieu’s Theory of Practice and Critical Race Theory in Education, Educational Studies, 55(6), 651–666. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131946.2019.1666395
Wilson, M. (2008). Wandering Significance: An Essay on Conceptual Behavior. Oxford University Press.
Yosso, T. J. (2005). Whose culture has capital? A critical race theory discussion of community cultural wealth. Race Ethnicity and Education, 8(1), 69–91. https://doi.org/10.1080/1361332052000341006
07. Social Justice and Intercultural Education
Paper
Transcending Racialized Hierarchies in Health and Physical Education Research and Practice: Racial literacy and Indigenous Knowledges
Troy Meston, Debbie Bargallie, Sue Whatman
Griffith University, Australia
Presenting Author: Meston, Troy;
Bargallie, Debbie
In Australia, Indigenous peoples continue to fight against coloniality, and education remains a crucial theatre in the war for sovereignty and self-determination. For well over a decade, despite reinvigorated educational and Indigenous social welfare policies, the creation of federal agencies, a national curriculum and a standardised literacy and numeracy assessment program, Indigenous learners remain behind Australian learners (Fahey, 2021). After iterations of exclusionary legislations were repealed at the state levels enabling Indigenous learners to attend white classrooms (Kerwin and Van Issum, 2013), education, and to a greater extent literacy, continued, as Rogers and Mosley (2006, p. 462) notes, “to function as a replacement of property as a means of preserving the rights of citizenship for whites”. Politically determined intimacies between property rights, rights to become literate and social inclusion, have functioned, as “a set of socio-economic assets available only to those who have been certified as white by major economic, legal, and cultural institutions” (Harris, 1993, p. 1707). The intersection between education, whiteness and property has been discussed for some time by Gloria Ladson-Billings (2003, p. xi), observing, “literacy represents a form of property. It is property that was traditionally owned and used by whites in the society”. Whiteness then is endowed the privilege to possess education as institutional and psychological entitlement, which from micro-cultural practices within classrooms, excites, so to maintain, racial hierarchies necessary to reify multi-level coloniality projects. Aboriginal scholar, Aileen Moreton-Robinson (2016, p. 112), ascribes within the context of Australia, “Racialization is the process by which whiteness operates possessively to define and construct difference in bodily attributes and to designate them as markers of hierarchical social categorisations within discourse”.
Health and physical education (HPE) is a discursively white, Western learning space (Flintoff, 2018). Classrooms are managed by practitioners who are mostly white, despite an increasingly multi-cultural and multi-lingual student body (Flintoff and Dowling, 2019). Within HPE, orthodoxy is derived from scientism, heteronormativity and gender disparity (Azzarito and Solomon, 2005), body image, classism, racism, and competitive and elite sports, surreptitiously silences student diversity, and seeds quotidian racism and microaggression in learning encounters (Blackshear and Culp, 2021; Clark, 2019). Despite minor disruptions to orthodoxy through radical scholarship, such as critical whiteness (Matias and Boucher, 2021), queer and anti-racism scholarship (Clark, 2020), and the implementation of curricular devices promoting inclusion and diversity, such as the cross-curriculum priorities in the Australian Curriculum and Yulunga: Indigenous Games (Edwards and Meston, 2007), much work within the discipline remains.
As curricular encounters occur upon stolen Aboriginal lands and the congealed blood of ongoing racially constructed conflict; unreconciled histories, Indigenous languages, and Indigenous Knowledges (IK) have a fundamental role to play in the continued disruption. However, IK remains largely invalidated by Western science, as such, distinct languages, protocols, ethics, ontologies, and epistemologies, conflict how non-Indigenous practitioners can approach these complex systems as tools of curriculum and pedagogy. Given Australian educational institutions are yet to move beyond defensive, racist, assimilationist and authoritarian postures relative to Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination (Bodkin-Andrews and Carlson, 2016), as the early work of Nakata (2002) reminds, one cannot essentialise the relocation of living, community-familial centric IK, by simply dropping IK into the contested mires of Western institutions. For advocates to lean into Indigenous cultural tropes as tools of healing and disruption, it is necessary to properly grapple with the terse reality of the historically contingent, socio-political Indigenous present (Moreton-Robinson, 2020). In this paper, we engage the complexity of invoking IK within the discursive landscapes of Australian educational institutions, and guide educators toward the need for building, progressive, non-linear racial literacy, so to better unlock the disruptive qualities of IK in HPE.
Methodology, Methods, Research Instruments or Sources UsedIn this paper we employ trans-systemic theorisation, drawn from legal scholars in Canada seeking to bridge Roman and British legal traditions (see Emerich, 2017), contending this offers a useful theoretical foundation to engage the liminal spaces between contested and divergent knowledge traditions. Bargallie and Lentin (2022) argued in their work engaging the epistemological distance between critical race theory and critical Indigenous theories and methodologies, of which, Indigenous Knowledge and community context are central, the nuances of Australian settler-coloniality calls for a specificity of approach, premised upon interweaving local theorisation with theorisation from abroad, so to better embolden the fight against race. However, underpinning Indigenous-centric trans-systemia, Battiste and Henderson (2021, p. vii) outline, are imperfect, stymied ‘tightropes’ premised upon Eurocentric knowledge which is,
filled with absences and gaps, such that learners are both what they know and what they don’t know. Moreover, if what we know is deformed by absences, denial, or incompleteness, our knowledge is partial and limited. This view of knowledge suggests that ignorance is an essential part of learning [and] the belief that knowledge systems need to learn from each other.
So, to better wield Indigenous Knowledges within HPE for disruptive purposes, strategic shifts in practice is desperately required. Therefore, an inter-weaving of theory is necessary, so to construct an apt and pointed, applied logics of the present, which clarifies and accentuates the effects of settler-colonialism upon the institution of the Indigenous body, its places of space, mind, materialist forms and metaphysics of spirit. As there is a necessity to accurately engage the relationship which exists historically between Indigenous places and bodies, in parallel to Western institutions, research, and educational practices, and the recently acquired proximity of Indigeneity to participate in, act as stakeholder, arbiter, and producer of neo-Indigenous/Westernised educational practice. By utilising trans-systemic coalitions drawn from Critical Race Theory, Critical Indigenous Studies, and Indigenous Knowledges, we advance, HPE curricular encounters, driven via a racial literacy framework to preface engagements with Indigenous Knowledges, offer a much richer, pointed learning encounter.
Conclusions, Expected Outcomes or FindingsInside the domain of global Health and Physical Education, racialised ways of knowing, being, and doing (Martin, 2008) are associated with the normative functioning of whiteness and Western knowledge systems. In the Australian context, via curriculum models and pedagogical practice, limited but growing opportunities are being taken to broaden, challenge, and disrupt these racialised enactments of Health and Physical Education. We have illustrated how Indigenous Knowledges in the Australian Curriculum can function as disruptive opportunities, where and when, educators have the will to intellectually invest in building racial literacy and enactments geared toward epistemic justice. We have critiqued examples from scholars who have employed Indigenous knowledges as a pedagogic and/or curricular devices, or as a device for integration, and have discussed some of the challenges emergent from this practice. We reasoned that Indigenous knowledges within Health and Physical Education are necessary for disrupting settler-colonial interpretations of Indigeneity across the Australian social collective, laying seeds for broader societal change. However, this is only possible by employing trans-systemic frameworks drawn from Critical Race Theory and Critical Indigenous Studies and critical whiteness studies, which prevents the inclusion of Indigenous Knowledges as another settler-colonial act of cultural appropriation and possessionism. Indigenous knowledges in built into Health and Physical Education offer available opportunities to open critical conversations, moving both educators and students forward via dialectical synergy. It is within this synergism that the utility of racial literacy and epistemic justice becomes apparent. Bringing Indigenous knowledges and Western knowledges into tension with each other, to interrogate what is known and to seize agency where possible, will create messy, non-linear disruption sites necessary inside Health and Physical Education.
ReferencesAndersen, C. (2009). Critical Indigenous studies: From difference to density. Cultural Studies Review, 15(2), 80-100.
Azzarito, L., & Solomon, M. A. (2005). A reconceptualization of physical education: The intersection of gender/race/social class. Sport, Education and Society, 10(1), 25-47.
Baldwin, A., & Erickson, B. (2020). Introduction: Whiteness, coloniality, and the Anthropocene. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 38(1), 3-11.
Bargallie, D., & Lentin, A. (2022). Beyond convergence and divergence: Towards a ‘both and’ approach to critical race and critical Indigenous studies in Australia. Current Sociology, 70(5), 665-681.
Battiste, M., and Henderson, S. (2021). Indigenous and Trans-Systemic Knowledge Systems (ᐃᐣdᐃgᐁᓅᐢ ᐠᓄᐤᐪᐁdgᐁ ᐊᐣd ᐟᕒᐊᐣᐢᐢᐩᐢᑌᒥᐨ ᐠᓄᐤᐪᐁdgᐁ ᐢᐩᐢᑌᒼᐢ). Engaged Scholar Journal: Community-Engaged Research, Teaching and Learning, 7(1), i-xix.
Blackshear, T., & Culp, B. (2021). Transforming PETE’s initial standards: Ensuring social justice for Black students in physical education. Quest, 73(1), 22-44.
Bodkin-Andrews, G., & Carlson, B. (2016). The legacy of racism and Indigenous Australian identity within education. Race Ethnicity and Education, 19(4), 784-807.
Bonilla-Silva, E., & Embrick, D. G. (2006). Softly" with Color Blindness. Reinventing critical pedagogy, 21.
Clark, L. (2020). Toward a critical race pedagogy of physical education. Physical Education and Sport Pedagogy, 25(4), 439-450.
Clark, L. (2019). The way they care: An ethnography of social justice physical education teacher education. The Teacher Educator, 54(2), 145-170.
Edwards, K., & Meston, T. (2007). Yulunga: Traditional Indigenous Games. Canberra: Ausport.
Flintoff, A. (2018). Diversity, inclusion and (anti) racism in health and physical education: What can a critical whiteness perspective offer? Fritz Duras Lecture, Melbourne University, 22 November 2017. Curriculum Studies in Health and Physical Education, 9(3), 207-219.
Flintoff, A., & Dowling, F. (2019). ‘I just treat them all the same, really’: Teachers, whiteness and (anti) racism in physical education. Sport, Education and Society, 24(2), 121-133.
Foucault, M. (2019). The history of sexuality: 1: the will to knowledge. Penguin UK.
Foucault, M. (2005). The order of things. Routledge.
Frankenburg, R. (1993). White women, race matters: The social construction of whiteness. Routledge.
Moreton-Robinson, A. (2020). I still call Australia home: Indigenous belonging and place in a white postcolonizing society. In Uprootings/Regroundings Questions of Home and Migration (pp. 23-40). Routledge.
Moreton-Robinson, A. (2016). Race and cultural entrapment. Critical Indigenous studies: Engagements in first world locations, 102.
Moreton-Robinson, A. (2015). The white possessive: Property, power, and indigenous sovereignty. U of Minnesota Press.
Nakata, M. N. (2007). Disciplining the savages, savaging the disciplines. Aboriginal Studies Press.
07. Social Justice and Intercultural Education
Paper
Problematizing Critical and Quantitative Research in Education: A Review of the Literature
Laura Vernikoff1, Emilie Mitescu Reagan2
1Touro University, United States of America; 2Claremont Graduate University
Presenting Author: Vernikoff, Laura
Quantitative research continues to receive outsized attention in educational research, policy, and practice arenas (Garcia, et al., 2018). This is due, in part, to calls for rigorous large-scale research that has the capacity to make causal claims, and reduce large amounts of numerical data to trends and averages for large samples and subgroups. Further, quantitative research is commonly perceived as “objective,” based on seemingly neutral data that can lead to increased accountability and successful educational reform (Gillborn, et al. 2018).
However, scholars from around the globe have long-critiqued how numbers, categories, codes, and statistical approaches have been used as tools of oppression that perpetuate inequities (e.g., Arrellano, 2022). The decisions that policy makers and researchers make about what data to collect, how to analyze data, and how to interpret and report results are never neutral, as when researchers try to attribute the effects of racism to inherent qualities of particular racial and ethnic groups (Gillborn et al., 2018). Scholars argue that quantitative research has failed to adequately address questions related to diversity, including individuals’ complex and intersectional identities, leading to damaging outcomes for minoritized groups (e.g., Keenan, 2022; Sablan, 2019; Viano & Baker, 2020).
To address these concerns, over the past fifteen years, researchers have developed frameworks for conducting critical and quantitative research in education that explicitly aim to offer nuance on labels and categories, shed light on inequitable opportunities, advance social justice, and disrupt oppressive educational practices (e.g., Gillborn et al., 2018; Viano & Baker, 2020). These frameworks include critical quantitative methods (Stage, 2007); critical race quantitative intersectionality (Covarrubias et al., 2017); and QuantCrit [Quantitative Critical Race Theory] (Gillborn et al., 2018). Along these lines, quantitative researchers have also adapted frameworks traditionally used in qualitative research to better understand the experiences of specific groups or the effects of particular types of categorization, including TribalCrit (Sabzalian et al., 2021), LatCrit (Covarrubias & Lara, 2014), DisCrit (Cruz et al., 2021), and Queer Theory (Curley, 2019). As a result, there is a growing body of research that applies principles and frameworks in critical and quantitative research in education.
In this review of the literature, we synthesize 62 empirical peer-reviewed publications, published between 2008 - 2022, that are framed by critical and quantitative perspectives. Specifically, we apply Banks’s (2006) “characteristics of multicultural (transformative” research,” to analyze the ways in which critical and quantitative frameworks have been operationalized, the methodological decisions that aim to shed light on educational inequities when conducting research on diversity, and the tensions that arise when conducting critical and quantitative research in education. The following questions guide this review:
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How does critical and quantitative research address questions that are of concern to historically marginalized and minoritized groups?
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What methodological decisions do critical and quantitative researchers make as they attempt to describe the experiences, values, and perspectives of marginalized groups in accurate, valid, and sensitive ways?
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What are the intended and unintended consequences of critical and quantitative research in education?
Drawing on Banks’s (2006) questions for multicultural and transformative research, in the full paper, we address tensions that arise at every stage of the research process, from collecting and accessing data, to analyzing and reporting data. Due to space limitations, we describe tensions related to collecting and accessing quantitative data in this proposal, and ways in which researchers used critical and quantitative frameworks to try to address those tensions.
Methodology, Methods, Research Instruments or Sources UsedTo identify literature for this review, we searched electronic databases including the Educational Resource Information Center (ERIC), Google Scholar, and ProQuest, using the terms “critical quantitative” “quantitative critical,” or “quantcrit” and “education,” filtered by “peer-reviewed.” We looked for empirical articles published between 2008 - 2022, marking the time since significant conceptual articles on critical and quantitative perspectives were published (e.g., Stage, 2007, Gillborn, et al., 2018). We also conducted electronic searches of journals that published special issues on quantitative and critical perspectives (e.g. Race Ethnicity and Education) and traced research that cited major conceptual publications on quantitative and critical perspectives. This search process initially yielded 108 publications.
As we identified literature, we read the abstracts of articles to select those that were empirical, peer-reviewed, and applied critical and quantitative frameworks, and were published in English. We included studies that clearly documented the purpose of the study, participants, data sources, analyses, and findings. We excluded studies that employed qualitative or mixed methods because those methods have a longer tradition of using critical frameworks; we wanted to understand how researchers are attempting to conduct critical and quantitative research, specifically. From there, we identified 62 studies that met our criteria, noting the increase in the number of publications over the past five years. We found that the majority of the empirical research took place in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia.
We created a spreadsheet with detailed information for each study, including the focus (e.g., racism, sexism, science, higher education) and purpose, as well as notes on the study’s methodological decisions related to collecting, accessing, analyzing, and reporting on quantitative data from critical perspectives. We also charted how each study defined and operationalized critical and quantitative research. Each author charted a subset of studies, and we met regularly to discuss tensions we found at each stage of conducting critical and quantitative research.
At each phase of the research process, we analyzed how the the quantitative and critical research addressed Banks’s (2006) key questions related to multicultural and transformative research, including: “Who has power to define groups and institutionalize [quantitative] concepts?; What is the relationship between [quantitative] knowledge and power?; Who benefits from the ways in which key concepts are defined? [And] How does the positionality of the researchers influence the research” (p. 775 - 776).
Conclusions, Expected Outcomes or FindingsAcross the literature, researchers identified distinct, but related, tensions when conducting critical and quantitative research on diversity in education and proposed solutions for addressing those concerns. Due to space limitations, we briefly discuss tensions related to collecting quantitative data as an example in our findings. We will expand upon that discussion and also address tensions related to operationalizing frameworks, and to analyzing and reporting on quantitative data in the final paper.
Statistical analyses often require researchers to essentialize diverse groups in order to create categories for analysis. To address this problem, researchers have turned the lens of inquiry onto the creation of categories (Gillborn et al., 2018) and recommend conducting research into how individuals’ self-identification with different categories changes over time rather than assuming it is fixed and static (Viano & Baker, 2020). For example, quantitative research requires creating categories for analysis, yet, as Gillborn et al (2018) point out “categories are neither ‘natural’ nor given” ( p. 169). Rather than taking commonly-used categories for granted, the research we reviewed attempted to better understand participants’ complex, multifaceted identities through: 1) increasing the number of categories used for analysis (e.g., Wronowski et al., 2022 allowed participants to write-in how they identified rather than select from pre-determined categories); 2) using two categories for comparative purposes but changing who the “reference” group was to avoid centering the experiences of dominant groups (e.g., Fong et al., 2019 compared the experiences of Indigenous and non-Indigenous students); or 3) focusing on the heterogeneous experiences of one group in order to avoid comparisons across groups (e.g., Young et al., 2018) described the math achievement trajectory of Black girls over time). This perspective raises questions for how researchers describe and value the cultures and perspectives of individuals and groups (Banks, 2006).
ReferencesArellano, L. (2022) Questioning the science: How quantitative methodologies perpetuate inequity in higher education. Education Sciences, 12(2), 116.
Covarrubias, A. & Lara, A. (2014). The undocumented (Im)migrant educational pipeline: The influence of citizenship status on educational attainment for people of Mexican origin, Urban Education, 49(1) 75–110.
Covarrubias, A., Nava, P.E., Lara, A., Burciagac, R. Vélez,V.N., Solorzano, D.G. (2017). Critical race quantitative intersections: a testimonio analysis, Race, Ethnicity & Education, 2017, 1-21
Fong, C.J., Alejandro, A.J., Krou, M.R., Segovia, J., & Johnston-Ashton, K. (2019). Ya'at'eeh: Race-reimaged belongingness factors, academic outcomes, and goal pursuits among Indigenous community college students. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 59.
Garcia, N.M., Ibarra, J. M., Mireles-Rios, R. Rios, V.M., & Maldonado, K. (2022). Advancing QuantCrit to rethink the school-to-prison for Latinx and Black Youth. Journal of Criminal Justice Education, 33(2), 269-288.
Gillborn, D., Warmington, P., & Demack, S. (2018). Quantcrit: Education, policy, 'big data' and principles for a critical race theory of statistics. Race Ethnicity and Education, 21(2), 158-179.
Keenan, H. B. (2022). Methodology as pedagogy: Trans lives, social science, and the possibilities of education research. Educational Researcher, 51(5), 307-314.
Stage F.K. (2007). Answering critical questions using quantitative data. New Directions for Institutional Research, 133, 5–16.
Stage, F.K., & Wells, R.S. (2014). Critical quantitative inquiry in context. New Directions for Institutional Research, 158.
Stewart, D. (2013). Racially minoritized students at U.S. four-year institutions. The Journal of Negro Education, 82(2), 184-197
Viano, S., & Baker, D. J. (2020). How administrative data collection and analysis can better reflect racial and ethnic identities. Review of Research in Education, 44(1), 301–331.
Wronowski, M.L., Aronson, B., Reyes, G. Radina, R., Batchelor, K.E., Banda, R. & Rind, G. (2022). Moving toward a comprehensive program of critical social justice teacher education: A QuantCrit analysis of preservice teachers’ perceptions of social justice education, The Teacher Educator, DOI: 10.1080/08878730.2022.2122094
Young, J. L., Young, J. R., & Capraro, R. M. (2018). Gazing Past the Gaps: A Growth-Based Assessment of the Mathematics Achievement of Black Girls. The Urban Review, 50(1), 156-176. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11256-017-0434-9
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